From Cassandra to Sage

Finally, Marleen Durfee has prevailed. The peppy, fast-talking, middle-aged woman is seeing what she warned about becoming reality and looks forward to a brighter day. For most of this decade, the Pennsylvania native has harangued the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors about their mindlessly pro-growth development policies. And now, the turkeys have come home to roost.

We met for a story I wrote for Richmond's Style Weekly about how a perfect storm of extremely tight financing, bad planning and steadily shifting demographics is starting to make profound changes in how suburban growth is emerging in the Capital area, if not in the rest of the country.

Huge megaprojects such as the 4,600 house Branner Station project in eastern Chesterfield have come to an abrupt halt. Three more in eastern Henrico are delayed, as is the Roseland megaproject in western Chesterfield.

The icing on the cake, however, is Magnolia Green, a southwestern Chesterfield megaproject on the books for 20 years. The project which would project more exurbia mess even farther down the crowded Hull Street corridor struck financing shoals. When an auction was held last month to sell off a half-built golf course and lots for most of the project's 4,886 homes, there were no bidders. About three dozen or so homes have been built in piney woods of unbuilt roads and unpoured concrete.

Since 2000, Durfee has acted as a self-styled watchdog on out of control growth. "Residential is a big drain on society and the board of supervisors didn't understand this. They thought that building more homes paid for itself," she told me in a restaurant's outdoor patio.

Durfee had been a professional activist against drunk driving and worked in Pennsylvania and Lousiana before moving to Chesterfield County in 1986. She used some of her experience in her field on growth policies when she realized was was happening with Chesterfield. "There used to be 20 temporary buildings to handle school overcapacity. Now they are 200," he says. Police coverage is stretched much more thinly than the public realizes. When a new high school is built, catch-up style, it is almost immediately at full capacity.

How come? A lot of it has to do with history and the political culture of Chesterfield County, which at more than 400 square miles is almost twice the size of Henrico, Richmond's other big suburban county. Back in the 1950s, state road planners put Interstate 64 through Henrico, not Chesterfield, giving Henrico a better tax base because it provided commercial nodes for development at every cloverleaf.

Chesterfield, meanwhile, was stuck in its sleepy Southern-style way of doing business. Elected officials were good old boys and girls who made a fetish about being "Chesterfield-born" and were sops for every development project that came down the pike. Trouble was, their proud insularity made them woefully ignorant of suburban growth and in the 1990s on, they made stupid decision after stupid decision.

The good old boy and girl crowd never got the math that houses can't pay for their demands on services. For that you need extra retail and industry. They never considered how dependent upon cars the residential projects they approved were, leading to a host of other problems, such as more street congestion, more air pollution, longer commuting times, and even, according to a recent American Pediatric Association study, a new generation of fat children.

Durfee, often put down as a Yankee "come here" by professional Southerners, says she got involved in "smart growth" policies after consulting her twin brother, who is an urban planner. She attended scores of planning and board of supervisors meetings, endured insults that she was a stupid meddler and faced the wrath of Realtors, builders and other parts of housing-industrial complex. For a number of years, Chesterfield's board acted as anything but a democratic institution. Citizens asking tough questions at public meetings were routinely shouted down and put down and in one case, arrested after refusing to obey orders to shut up.

"I would go meetings think they'd be pro-active, but they were using outdated plans from 1989 to 1991. They just didn't understand, Durfee says. Magnolia Green, for instance, was approved for rezoning in 1991 and like many projects in Chesterfield, sat dormant for years.

Superviors did not heed long-term predictions that the demographic patterns that favored Chesterfield's family-oriented growth patterns in the 1980s and 1990s were coming to an abrupt halt now. Baby boomers who wanted the house and lot and land for their kids now aren't willing to upsize after their kids move on. The kids themselves tend not to want big, single family houses on big lots, preferring smaller units closer to urban centers.

The result, according to Chesterfield's planning deparment, is that the county has about 50,000 rezoned lots not yet built upon. That's more than the rest of suburban Richmond combined and exceeds even the number in Loudoun County, once the nation's fastest-growing suburban area. Builders complain that a lot of these rezoned lots are in places where people don't want to live, ignoring the fact that they were cheerleaders for rezoning back in the day. And, due to peculiarities in state law, it is very hard to downzone upzoned property. So who knows what will happen to places such as Magnolia Green.

As for Durfee, she prevailed in 2007 elections and won a supervisor's position in a tight, four-candidate race. She says that the county is upgrading its comprehensive plan and for the first time in decades will look at growth on a holistic, rather than piecemeal, basis. And for someone treated like the County Idiot for many years, she's suddenly looking pretty savvy.

Peter Galuszka